Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Verse of the Day
Verse of the Day
Nov 30, 2025 11:13 AM

  Commentary on Today's Verse

  Commentary on Deuteronomy 30:15-20

  (Read Deuteronomy 30:15-20)

  What could be said more moving, and more likely to make deep and lasting impressions? Every man wishes to obtain life and good, and to escape death and evil; he desires happiness, and dreads misery. So great is the compassion of the Lord, that he has favoured men, by his word, with such a knowledge of good and evil as will make them for ever happy, if it be not their own fault. Let us hear the sum of the whole matter. If they and theirs would love God, and serve him, they should live and be happy. If they or theirs should turn from God, desert his service, and worship other gods, that would certainly be their ruin. There never was, since the fall of man, more than one way to heaven; which is marked out in both Testaments, though not with equal clearness. Moses meant that same way of acceptance, which Paul more plainly described; and Paul's words mean the same obedience, on which Moses more fully treated. In both Testaments the good and right way is brought near, and plainly revealed to us.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
How Ayn Rand’s Philosophy Supports the Welfare State
The paradox of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, James Joseph explains, is that her defense of individual freedom provides a “self-defeating apologia for the American welfare state.” Here we have Ms Rand’s answer to the murder-fueled regimes of munism: The Individual is the sole scale of value, individual freedom is necessary to the individual survival, she says, and my survival is the sole end of my existence. Community, in this scheme of values, is entirely without meaning, or at least without objective...
Appreciating the Role of Subsidiarity
Subsidiarity, the idea that those closest to a problem should be the ones to solve it, plays a particular role in development. However, it can be an idea that is a bit “slippery”: who does what and when? What is the role of faith-based organizations? What is the role of government? Susan Stabile, Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law, has written “Subsidiarity and the Use of Faith-Based Organizations in the Fight Against Poverty” at Mirror of...
‘There’s an open season on business people’
From the video vault, a classic presentation by Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president and co-founder of the Acton Institute, based on his monograph The Entrepreneurial Vocation. ...
Leading Up
Most of the time we spend on this planet we are looking down. Down at our desks . . . down at our feet . . . down at the dishes. Life is full of little details that require us to look down, put our backs into the work and get things done. But the problem with mon posture, as C.S. Lewis puts it, is that “…as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you.” Of...
Review: A Free People’s Suicide
Below is my review of A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future by Os Guinness. A final version of this book review will appear in the Fall 2012 Journal of Markets & Morality (15.2). You can subscribe here. «««◊»»» A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. By Os Guinness (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2012). 205 pages Review: A Free People’s Suicide That our republic suffers from disorder and decay is no secret. The...
Fr. Sirico on 9/11 and the End of Freedom
In his latest column at Forbes, Fr. Robert Sirico discusses his memories of 9/11 and the end of freedom: One might also be tempted to imagine that the answer to bin Laden’s religious mania is a morally neutral public square. But all the great and successful battles against tyranny, all the efforts to build flourishing free societies in the first place, teach a different lesson. Freedom, as indispensable as it is, is insufficient for constructing a society and culture appropriate...
Do We Belong to the Government or Does that Government Belong to Us?
During the recent Democratic National Convention, the party played a video which stated, “The government is the only thing we all belong to.” Daniel Kelly explains what’s wrong with such claims: That pact statement raises a question I thought we had settled quite some time ago: Are we a people who has a government, or a government that has a people? Pretty much the whole of Western political history is the story of ing the former and fleeing the latter....
Commercializing Chaplaincy
I thought this piece in BusinessWeek last month from Mark Oppenheimer was very well done, “The Rise of the Corporate Chaplain.” I think it profiles an important and under-appreciated phenomenon in the mercial sphere. One side of the picture is that this is a laudable development, since it shows that employers are increasingly aware that their employees are not merely meat machines, automata whose value is only to be calculated in terms of material concerns, and that spiritual matters cannot...
The Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty
To truly understand what a conservative believes, you must know what it is they want to conserve. Like many other Christians who identify as conservatives, my own answer to that question would be the same as that of Russell Kirk: The institution most essential to conserve is the family. Wherever you look—whether in the streets or the social science research—you’ll find confirmation that the breakdown of the family is correlated with societal ills such as children living in poverty. We...
Rand or Röpke?
On his personal blog, author and publishing industry executive Joel J. Miller asks, “What if we dumped Rand for Röpke?” Good question. Miller says that it’s simply unnecessary for Christians to invoke Rand in their defense of the free market. Why not base that defense on the work of a Christian economist instead? “Unlike Rand,” he writes, “Röpke grounded his critique of socialism and his defense of free markets in a thoroughly Christian understanding of man and his world.” He...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved